


The Visitor

by worldswrst (thehotinpsychotic)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Creepy, Horror, Mystery, Other, Supernatural - Freeform, Suspense, Thriller
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 00:03:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19161724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehotinpsychotic/pseuds/worldswrst
Summary: A woman who lives alone unwillingly hosts a strange visitor.





	The Visitor

I hadn’t been relaxing for more than a few minutes when I heard my doorbell ring. My eyes immediately flashed to the clock, which read precisely 10:23 p.m. Who would want something at this hour? As I stood to answer, I poured over any possible explanations in my head. It could just be Ms. Jorgensen, my soft spoken, elderly neighbor with a small dash of dementia, enough to easily lead her to mistakenly home as her own. Or maybe it was one of those rowdy holders from the couple down the street pushing sales for some school event. Although, it’s hard to imagine that they’d send their kids out knocking on doors after dark. As I raised myself onto my tiptoes to peer through the peephole, u recoiled back at the sight. On my doorstep stood a tall, lean man cloaked in dark clothing. From underneath a brimmed hat, I could make out an eerie white mask with exaggerated, grotesque features. 

 

He must have sensed my presence, because he began to speak, his voice as deep and as clear as the night sky looming overhead. “May I come inside?”

 

I felt as though I were in a trance as I unpatched the deadbolt, easing back the heavy oak door calmly. With just a locked screen door between us, I searched to meet his eyes, which were dark and cold. “No, you may not. Do you need help?”

 

The man paused before repeating what he’d said, only more urgently this time. “May I come inside?”

 

“No,” I replied. 

 

“You have to let me in,” he insisted. He was starting to sound angry, and I closed the door as he repeated in a booming voice, “May I come inside?” 

 

I slipped the deadbolt back into its place, listening intently. He began to knock incessantly on the door, so loudly that it felt as though the room itself was shaking. The doorbell sounded over and over at the same time, but the man saiid nothing. He spoke through the dark varnish of my oak door and the dusty plastic of my doorbell as he continued to rattle the threshold with outrageous banging. I sunk to the floor, burying my head between my knees as I prayed for this stranger to disappear. After what felt like a few torturous hours, all of the noise suddenly ceased. I stayed in the floor for some time, too afraid to move. Eventually, I mustered up the courage to gaze through my peephole once again. The man was gone, it seemed. Holding my breath, I pushed back the door, stepping outside into the col night. The man was nowhere to be seen, to my relief. However, not a moment later I noticed something very upsetting. In my yard, a message had been freshly burned into the grass. In fact, the lawn was still smoldering as I approached the charred note: I will come back another time.

 

I ended up moving out of the house that fall. After what had happened; it simply didn’t feel safe there anymore. The house eventually ended up in the hands of an expecting couple, and while I had initially planned on warning them about the visitor I had received, I decided to keep it to myself when I realized she was pregnant. I hadn’t heard from the stranger since, and while it was unusual, it was just a one-time occurrence that happened months ago. Besides, I figured they were stressed out enough as it was without anticipating an anonymous, menacing guest that could appear at any moment. 

 

I did end up hearing from that couple several years down the road. They too, had moved out of the house that served as a venue for what was the single handedly most traumatic event of my adult life. I had gotten back into contact with the wife just a few months after they had left. After exchanging pleasantries, I chose to be direct as I inquired as to why she and her husband decided to move out. She shared that one evening, when her husband was putting in late hours at work and she was home alone with her daughter, not even four months old, she was woken from a much needed rest when her doorbell began to ring. She noticed it rang once, and as she got dressed to answer the door, she heard it sound three more times, each time closer than the last, more impatient. 

 

As she rounded to the first landing on the staircase, her fingers closed around a Louisville slugger. Creeping towards the front door, which was by now being bombarded with persistent ringing of the doorbell, almost nonstop, a flat line. She felt as though she were about to faint, she told me. In all her life. She had never been so frightened. 

 

Her eyes reached the peephole, and as her vision locked on her visitor, she gasped loudly and staggered backwards. A man, slender and towering over the petite mother at nearly six feet tall, was standing stoically on her porch, his face concealed by a tinted black grocery sack with a hole torn in to reveal one dark, clouded eye. Before she could gather the courage to speak, he demanded, “May I come inside?”

 

Shaking her head in an unconscious protest, she secured the deadbolt and replied firmly, “No. Now leave.”

 

He rattled the doorknob with such violence that she feared it would break. She began to son as he pounded viciously in the door, sending the neighbors’ pit bull into a barking frenzy. The doorbell choked insistently as the knocking proceeded, growing louder and louder. She didn’t know how much time had passed when the episode ended, but she stood numbly in shock, unsure if her nightmare was truly over or if she had mistakenly convinced herself it had. She was still too afraid to own the door, but when she tried to look through the peephole, she realized that it had been blacked out, obscuring her view. 

 

Sliding the deadbolt aside gently, she slowly opened the front door as she trembled with fear, her other hand immediately flying to the screen door handle to assure it was locked. Huffing a brief sigh of relief when she saw that the man had vanished, she turned to the wooden door to inspect whatever had been blocking her sight. All she could do then was shake as she began to sob, staring horrified at the Polaroid of her in her own driveway exiting her car with the handwritten caption: I’m getting to know you. The photograph had been taped over the glass hastily. She tore the photo down, saving it despite how much it terrified her to look at it. She wanted to show it to her husband. It’s not like he could ever believe her story if she didn’t. 

 

They immediately contacted the local police, who conducted a stakeout by their home to guarantee their safety. They also provided escorts when needed and opened an anonymous tip line about the case. Days passed by with no news, and eventually weeks. The usual patrol outside of their home was absent, the sudden lack of activity sending resources scrambling.

 

The nightmare seemed to have ended as suddenly as it had started, and the small family was wracked with a premature sense of relief at the returning regularity of their lives. Not even a week into this paradise, their fate had turned. 

 

In an interesting turn of events, the husband was the stranger’s next target. He came to him as he had all the other play things, asking to be let inside. Things took a similar path as they previously had when the husband refused, only this time, the visitor didn’t leave a message burned in the lawn or a Polaroid on the door. When the husband stumbled outside in horror, his eyes fell upon one of his daughter’s tiny sneakers. Attached to them, a malicious note merely read: you cannot protect them. 

 

The family soon after that followed in my footsteps, vacating the house as soon as they confirmed a buyer. They ended up moving out of state entirely, and they are apparently now doing much better. Their little girl just turned seven this past March. 

 

I found that for the rest of my life, I feared the day the visitor returned. No matter who assured me that it was in my past, I could never shake the feeling that we would cross paths again. Ever since that evening, I had a debilitating fear of living alone. Even to this day, in my tender old age, I house a French bulldog to keep me company. Along with this fear came an onslaught of nightmares, which then progressed to night terrors followed by intermittent bouts of sleep paralysis. When I pictured the visitor in my dream, I imagined him wearing both the mask the wife had described as well as the original latex disaster he had worn when I first met him. No matter what mask he wears though, his eyes are always vacant and impossibly black, and his words are clear and concise. “May I come inside?”

**Author's Note:**

> So this is one of the few suspenseful/horror type short stories I’ve written! Please let me know what you think; I love feedback. Feel free to check out my other original works on my page. Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed it.


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